On this page, we go over several of the most frequently asked questions regarding
Blood Death Knight in World of Warcraft — Battle for Azeroth Battle for Azeroth (BfA) 8.1.5.
This will be updated as more common repeated questions surface over the course
of the expansion.

1. How Much Haste should Blood Death Knights Have? / Is There a Haste Cap for Blood Death Knights?

Blood has no "soft caps" or "minimum thresholds" with any Haste, or any other
stat. Secondary stats for Blood are all close enough to each other in value that
you should prioritize item level over secondary stat itemization for nearly any
piece of gear, except trinkets and rings.

Versatility and Haste are very close in value — while Versatility is
numerically better than Haste, the two are close enough in value that many Blood
Death Knights prefer to prioritize Haste, as increased Haste allows for better
reactions, which helps maximize Death Strike efficiency.

2. What Race is Best for Blood Death Knights?

For Alliance players, we recommend Worgen. Darkflight will
help to shore up Blood Death Knights' lack of mobility.

3. Should I Play Defensively or Offensively?

This is the main question most people will ask with tanking. The basic
answer is that if you are doing progression or are on a character you do not
feel comfortable playing offensively with, you should play defensively. As you
start to get comfortable, you should start looking at DPS a bit more and play a
more mixed style, where you start pushing DPS while slowly giving up
survivability. Once you feel completely comfortable with the encounter and you
will not hold your raid back, you can then go for DPS. This point is different
for every person, as it depends on your group, your character, your gear, and
your skill level.

For Blood, to shift from defense to offense, consider the following
choices.

Replace one or both of your tanking trinkets with DPS trinkets. This is
often the easiest and most significant change you can make. Note that very few
trinkets exist in Battle for Azeroth that are tanking-specific; you should feel
comfortable using a non-tanking trinket that provides advantageous stats without
feeling like you are impairing your survivability.

Many of our default recommendations for Blood assume you will be playing at
least somewhat offensively to begin with. To shift more defensively, consider
the following changes.

Take Purgatory. Competing with Red Thirst can make
this difficult to do, as it requires adjusting your cooldown plan, but
especially when progressing on new content this ability will effectively allow
you to learn fights twice as fast. As the tank, you should plan to be the first
player to master a new encounter, and the last to die — unexpected tank
deaths are a greater hindrance to progression by far than other deaths. It is
often worth relying on an additional external cooldown during progression to
make this available to select.

Take Rune Strike. While this talent does add some complexity to
your rotation, the additional Runic Power throughput can be very helpful if you need
additional sustained mitigation.

Use Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle. This is a significant hit to
your damage output — as much as a 7% loss — but it provides a
sizable increase to your effective Health through the buff to both Armor and
Stamina.

Use Stamina food and flasks. Generally, this should be your last option;
you trade mitigation and damage both for an increased health pool, which makes
you take more damage overall while noticeably reducing your damage potential.
As a general rule, only consider this if you need the additional Health to
survive specific attacks.

4. Can I Sim Myself? Should I?

The Blood Death Knight module for SimulationCraft is well-maintained and can
generally be relied upon to help understand the effect to damage output your
gear, talent, and Azerite trait choices can have.

That having been said, SimulationCraft cannot be used to evaluate
defensive choices. Do not consider simulations in a vacuum; a choice having
the highest damage potential does not make it the best choice.

5. Changelog

22 Jan. 2019: This page has been reviewed for Season 2 and no changes are necessary.